Business-APP: SEM.DRIVE (Secure Cloud Storage)

Your business can spend more than $37,500 annually just by looking for misplaced document, recovering files, looking for files or filing or organizing documents. Take note that this does not even include the cost of reconstructing files or documents that were damaged or lost and the financial consequence of those lost files or documents. This is based on a simple calculation made Questysolutions :

• A small business gets or create 100 important paper documents per day that will later on be used again
• Each file takes an average of 6 minutes to file for a total of 600 minutes filing time
• 600 minutes per day is actually 10 hours per day which may be distributed across several employee
• Assuming you pay an average of $15 per hour, that would total $150 per day
• Multiply $150 to 250 working days per year and you will get $37,500 per year

This figure may be a little hard to believe especially for small business owners but consider again. Invoices, bills, customer profile, transaction history, complaints, inquiries and a whole lot more happen every single day. Many of these are ignored and forgotten simply because keeping record of them is too tedious. The reality is that everything that happens in a business is valuable data.

To file one thing, whether it’s a document, a graphic file or others, you need to make copies (digital or physical), process how or where it should be filed, put tags or notes and actually physically doing. The worse thing is that documents or files come, usually, one by one.

As mentioned, this calculation doesn’t even include the cost that businesses suffer when files get lost or services or productions are delayed because files can’t be found or have been damaged.

Many would think this is an exaggeration especially because computers offer so much redundancy in terms of document management. This claim was further confirmed by Aberdeen. According to their study, a small business losses an average of $163,674 in direct cost of because of poor file management . That could amount to millions for bigger companies.

Proper Filing Leads to Better Customer Service

A big part of better customer service and better business process, in general, is being able to provide information or answers questions with several clicks. Imagine talking with a customer on the phone who is asking for a quote. You give them your company’s standard pricing and the customer hangs up the phone. What you didn’t know is that the customer has bought your products or services about three years but it would be impossible for you to remember each of the customers you encounter especially because you handle hundreds of them daily.

With sem.DRIVE, all you will need to do is type the name of the company or anyone associated with the customer’s company and you will see all of the customer’s past transactions with you even if the files were of four years ago. Your files are kept safe, searchable and accessible.

With a few clicks, you can make the customer know that you still value their business, give them better pricing and offer more relevant services or products.

sem.DRIVE for Better Business Process

sem.DRIVE creates a file management pathway that leads you to better customer service and business process. All you need is to fill it up with information and every document or file will be at your finger tip. You can describe word document, images, PDF files or other files using names associated with the company, products, services, descriptions and dates.

Let us assume you are running a catering service. You can keep a file for each pastry vendors. Each time a customer chooses pastries from a specific vendor, you can associate each customer to each vendor. You can easily spot who is the vendors that gets the most orders. Once you have the numbers, you can easily negotiate for a better price based in exchange of committing more orders.

You can do the same thing on the customer side. You can keep a file for a customer and organize the file into subcategories. Assume you sell wedding gowns, party gowns and related products. Some of your regular customers are wedding planners. Based on their individual files, you can see if a specific customer constantly requests for certain styles or certain products. You can then offer better quality or offer better rates in order to nurture your relationship.

Unprecedented Security

Hacking is not the biggest threat in business. Natural disaster is. Much as nobody wants this to happen, natural disasters have brought down businesses before. Tornadoes, earthquakes and other events have caused governments, non-profit organizations and private businesses millions. Important data are loss and people are left helpless.

If natural disaster can bring government operations to a halt, imagine what it can do to a private business. Gartner’s research found out that natural disaster has more chances of becoming the cause of data loss than any other reason. You may not lose the same amount of files but the impact is just as hard. All your contracts, customer files, financial documents and employee records are lost. With sem.DRIVE, all you will need is a computer and internet access and you can resume your business.

Granted that many other online project management tool offers or promises back up, sem.DRIVE is the only one that offers secure transfer protocol 256 Bit Password encryption, high security data in three countries (Germany, Switzerland, USA) and daily back up of your data.

Don’t Lose a Business Because of Poor Document Management

The IT Process Institute's Visible Ops Handbook stated that many 80% of businesses are lost because of poorly planned document system. Many document systems are misconfigured leading to errors in billing, missed opportunity to cut cost and poor customer service. It is hard enough to accept losing a sale but when the cause is as simple as not being able to cut a bid by several thousands of dollars which could have been easily done if a better strategy was laid out with vendors and budgeting, it simply unacceptable.

Sem.DRIVE is not just a back up system. It is a platform that allows you to get insights on how you can make your business planning more efficient and empower your customer service.